1795. There is a striking convergence between Hartshorne's . . .

SCANNED PDF

There is a striking convergence between Hartshorne's analysis of "reason" in "Two Levels of Faith and Reason" and Nygren's analysis of the three types of objective argumentation or science in Meaning and Method.

True, Hartshorne does not come right out and say that the type of argumentation proper to philosophy, or philosophy qua metaphysics, is "transcendental deduction," or "analysis of presuppositions." But there is nothing he says that would in any way conflict with his saying this, and among the different things he says by way of characterizing metaphysics is this statement: "[T]he metaphysician studies the most utterly basic features of experience and thought which are presupposed by any world whatever and by any truth whatever" (RSP: 175). Substitute "the philosopher" for "the metaphysician" in this statement, and one can find any number of exactly parallel formulations in Nygren's discussion.

Moreover, I do not have the least doubt that Hartshorne's attempt to justify metaphysics as "an expression of reason" and "a legitimate rational enterprise" would have been less vague and more convincing had he availed himself of Nygren's clarity in distinguishing the three types of "scientific argumentation," including the philosophical type along with the types represented respectively by the special sciences and by logic and mathematics.

On the other hand, there is a feature of Hartshorne's discussion that compensates for a notable lack in Nygren's—namely, the clarity with which he explains that and how philosophy and metaphysics are, in their way, as "experiential" as the special sciences. Thus he says that metaphysics is "an attempt to describe the most general aspects of experience, to abstract from all that is special in our awareness, and to report as clearly and accurately as possible upon the residuum. . . .The true role of deduction in metaphysics is . . . to bring out the meaning of tentative descriptions of the metaphysically ultimate in experience so that we shall be better able to judge if they do genuinely describe this ultimate. . . . [W]e may, if we are lucky, be able to see that one of them is evidently true to that residuum of experience which is left when all details variable in imagination have been set aside" (175). 

To be sure, there is no explicit distinction made here between the "empirical" and the "existential" aspects of our experience. But, again, nothing that Hartshorne says precludes such a distinction, and I am quite clear that his discussion could only have been more adequate if he had somehow managed to make it.

22 September 1999